The Watchman (30 page)

"What the fuck's the Park Royal job?"

"Den, I'm family. Trust me.

"Oh, yeah? So who's the girl? Well handy with the Mace, it looked like."

"She's just a girl. Nothing to do with anything."

Den stared at his empty glass in silence, flipped his cigarette into the gathering darkness and nodded. For a moment, behind the flushed features, Alex saw the taut wariness of the Special Forces soldier. Then the dazzling smile returned and a large hand was placed on Alex's shoulder.

"Come on, son, we re wasting good drinking time. Tonight's on the house, yeah?"

He steered Alex back inside and moments later Marie was sliding Alex a glass of champagne and a shot-glass of Irish whiskey. Someone, to applause and laughter, began to sing "My Yiddisher Momma'.

Some time later Dawn reappeared beside him. Her cheeks were flushed and she seemed to be genuinely enjoying herself Under the circumstances it seemed natural for Alex to slip his arm round her waist, and for her in response to incline herself against him. For a moment he felt the soft pressure of her breast against his side.

"Thank you," he said again.

"That could have turned nasty, one way or another. How are you getting on with the gangster wives?"

She placed her champagne thoughtfully on the bar.

"They're good fun. I like them. Any progress?"

"I've dropped a name or two. Told him who I really am. Not who you are, though. Far as he's concerned, you're just my girl."

"Mm. Lucky me."

"The main problem is that he thinks I'm some sort of hit man. Possibly even come over here to whack him. He's very jumpy. I think the best thing I can do is to tell him the real reason I'm here and hope that calms things down."

"I agree. And this is looking like a rather serious conversation if I'm supposed to be some no-brain blonde bimbo." She pouted.

"Which I clearly am!"

He ran a finger down her cheek.

"It's just that you play the part so well."

"Now why am I suspicious of a compliment like that, I wonder?" she asked.

There was another burst of singing from the floor of the room. Someone had sat themselves at a piano and was banging out old Cockney songs.

"Are we within earshot of Bow Bells here, do you think?" mused Dawn, throwing back the remains of her drink.

"Basildon, maybe," said Alex.

"Not that I've got any quarrel with that, as an Essex man myself' Den Connolly suddenly appeared beside them, sweating and massive.

"Before I'm too pissed to understand a word you're saying," he asked Alex, 'who exactly was it you was after?"

Alex dismissed Dawn with a nod of his head and a pat on her dove-grey behind.

"Joseph Meehan. Code-named Watchman. You finished him for Box."

Connolly nodded.

"I ain't officially here," he said eventually, his words slurring.

"I ain't officially anywhere. But you know that."

Alex nodded.

"I know the score from Stevo. No one hears your name. Ever.

And if you can give me what I need you can rest easy about that other business."

"You gimme your word on that?" Connolly glanced meaningfully down at the assembled company.

"My friends'd be very pissed off if... They're my family now, y'understand -forget fuckin' Hereford, RWW, all that old bollocks."

Alex looked him in the eye.

"I give you my word."

Connolly pursed his lips and nodded slowly and vaguely to himself "Tomorrow. Lunchtime.

Bring your..." He gestured vaguely towards Dawn, who was whispering confidences to Marie.

"Meanwhiles, order anything you want. Open bar, like I said."

They left around 2 a.m. Not because Alex thought that Connolly might relent and talk to him that night, but because he felt that he needed to prove his credentials to the ex-NCO. He had to show proper respect. Leaving early would have been regarded as very graceless. So he had stuck around, downing drink after drink, and looking suitably impressed by the tales of blags, slags, grass-ups, fit-ups, bent coppers, unnumbered shooters and all the rest of the hard-man mythology.

Dawn meanwhile rested wide-eyed at his side, with her arm draped lightly round his waist. They looked, in short, like any impressionable young couple who happened to have stumbled into a bar full of criminals.

When the last goodbyes had been said and they'd finally reached the car, Dawn blinked hard several times and reached in her bag for the key.

"You OK to drive?" asked Alex blearily.

"I've actually drunk comparatively little," said Dawn.

"I always get rum and a Coke in that situation that way you can just keep your glass filled with Coke and no-one's the wiser.

Well, ephedrine or no, I'm well and truly bladdered, I'm afraid," Alex slurred.

"But mission accomplished, sort of' "Get in," said Dawn.

At the hotel they stood together for a moment in front of the open window. The port and the yachts were lit up now, and the sea was an inky black below them. A tide of drunken benevolence washed over Alex.

"You were great," he said feelingly, placing a hand on her warm shoulder.

"Especially Maceing that bonehead of Connolly's."

She smiled and inclined her cheek to his hand.

"You've already thanked me for that. I enjoyed myself What d'you think tomorrow holds?"

"Dunno. All that lunch invitation stuff was just to buy himself time. The more of his hospitality he can persuade us to soak up, the less bad he's going to feel about us leaving empty-handed. At the moment he accepts that I'm kosher and you're just the sweet thing I happen to be travelling with, but he's worried about who comes after me. Where it's all going to end."

"What's he got to hide, Alex?" she asked gently.

"Enough."

"So what promises did you make him?"

Careful, Alex told himself woozily. She doesn't know about the Park Royal job.

"Oh, I strung him along..."

"You think he'll talk to you tomorrow?" Dawn asked sharply.

"Because tomorrow's all we've got. In thirty hours Angela gets back from Washington and any time after that..."

Alex nodded. She didn't need to spell out the danger that Meehan posed. Privately, he was far from convinced that Connolly would talk to him, but he couldn't see how else the situation could have been handled. The alcohol was pounding at his temples now and the knife cuts were beginning to pulse in unison.

"Why don't I get those dressings off?" she asked him.

"Let a bit of fresh air at your poor face.

Lie down on the bed?"

He could quite easily have removed the dressings himself, but lay there breathing in her jasmine scent and her smoky hair, and the faint smell of rum on her breath. She was OK, was Dawn, he decided. A bit of a bitch at times and the most irritating bloody driver he'd ever met, but what the hell? She had a tough job. He could live with her downsides.

And she really was quite seriously pretty with those cool grey eyes and that soft, secretive mouth. Without especially meaning to, and with a vague stab at discretion, he glanced down the grey linen front of her dress as she inched the dressing from his cheek.

She didn't seem to be wearing any sort of bra and he recalled with a rush of pleasure the feel of her breasts against him in the bar.

"That's not fair," she said reproachfully.

"What's not fair?"

"Here I am, doing my big Florence Nightingale number and all you can do is stare down my front, panting like a dog. You're supposed to be an officer and a gentleman."

"No one ever said anything about being a gentleman," said Alex.

"And I'm not panting, I'm breathing."

"Well, stop it. And shut your eyes, or I'll rip your ear in half again and you wouldn't like that, now would you?"

Alex smiled, and tried not to think about George Widdowes' ears lying grey and bloodstained against the pillow. The same thought evidently occurred to Dawn, for her movements abruptly hardened and became businesslike.

When she had finished she stepped out on to the balcony with her mobile phone.

"Can you give me a moment?" she asked, punching out a number.

"Personal call."

He took himself into the bathroom. The boyfriend, he thought, and felt a sudden urge to hit Dawn's unknown lover very hard in the face. Several times, preferably.

He glanced in the mirror, at the angry black stitch-tracks across his face. You look like shite, Temple, he told himself You'd be lucky to trap some swamp donkey from Saxty's looking like that, let alone this foxy little spook. Get real.

By the time she returned he was down to his boxer shorts and looking for the Nurofen.

"Turn round," she said.

"Let me look at that thigh."

Alex obeyed. Five minutes later she folded her arms.

"OK," she began.

"This is the deal. You get the bed and the blankets from the cupboard, I get the quilt on the floor."

"I'll go on the floor. You take the bed."

"Normally I'd accept like a shot, but given the extent of your injuries I've decided to be generous. No arguments, Temple,

OK?"

Alex inclined his head and climbed into the bed. Dawn went into the bathroom. When she returned to the quilt on the floor she paused for a moment in front of the window, a slight and entirely feminine figure in her white T-shirt and knickers.

Alex groaned. For the first time that day he found himself in severe physical pain.

TWENTY-TWO.

"You're not going to throw up again, are you?" Dawn enquired.

"I don't think so," whispered Alex.

"But you couldn't just ask that waiter for a half of lager, could you?"

"Are you insane?"

"No, I know it sounds bad but it works. And since it seems to be impossible to get a decent fried breakfast in this hotel ..

"This is Spain, Alex, not the Mile End Road. Why don't you just lie back and get some sun, and stop being so scratchy?"

It was 10.30 and they were on adjoining sun loungers by the hotel pool. Dawn was wearing the red bikini they had bought at Heathrow, but not even this could raise Alex's spirits. A bad hangover had coincided with an acute bout of guilt and depression concerning George Widdowes.

The day before had been enjoyable and there had been an air of promise about things a sense that the mistakes of the past might somehow be redeemed by a little energetic detective work.

Now, everything seemed curiously pointless. If he weighed up his career and balanced the harm he had done and the deaths he'd caused against the long-term good, he was unable to state as he'd once been able to that on balance the good came out on top. It didn't. The bad came out on top.

Den Connolly had clearly felt that moving from unattributable operations for the RWW to boosting security vans on the North Circular Road was little more than a side shuffle. It wasn't a question of going into crime you were already there. You had already spent so much of your career so far outside the normal boundaries of behaviour that almost anything seemed logical and reasonable.

The trouble with crime, though, was criminals. They were stupid, for the most part, and greedy. And boastful, judging by last night, and sentimental, and seriously lacking in taste. No, he decided, you'd have to put your own outfit together. A few good, reliable blokes. Apply military standards of security, planning and execution.

And then what, assuming you did the bank and made your wad?

Buy a bar and a big telly, and listen to war stories and get fat? Dawn raised her head from the sun lounger and peered at him irritably. Her face was shining with sunscreen.

"What was it you said yesterday? Cheer up? Get a life? The sun's shining?"

Alex turned to face her and felt the day's first pale flicker of lust. The red lycra strap of the bikini top hung undone on either side of her and a single pearl of sweat lay in the small of her back. For a moment he stared at it, wondering how her skin would taste, then a waiter with a tray approached.

"Una cerveza para el Senor, por favor," murmured Dawn.

"Y un naranjafresca para mi, gracias."

"Si, Senora." The waiter nodded and disappeared.

"That sounded very fluent," said Alex.

"Yes, I told him you needed an enema for your bad mood."

"What I need is not to have drunk so bloody much last night."

"I expect you've done worse in the service of your country."

He grunted. The knife wounds were beginning to heal, and in consequence to itch like crazy.

"I

forgot to ask did you manage to rescue my weapon from the river?"

"The Glock? Yes. Plus your knife and a silenced Sig Sauer that Meehan must have been carrying. And while you were out for the count, by the way, we managed to get tissue scrapings and a couple of hairs from under your fingernails."

"Well, I certainly held on tight. But surely you don't need any proof of who you're dealing with?"

"Every confirmation helps. But our main hope is that we might be able to learn something about his whereabouts. The Forensic Science Service can tell you a hell of a lot from a hair."

Alex looked at her doubtfully.

"Good luck with that. The hair may well turn out to be more helpful than laughing boy down the road."

"If he's not going to tell us anything, why ask us to come back?"

"He'll probably produce something just to swing the immunity deal I promised him. The question is whether we'll be able to rely on what he produces."

Dawn frowned at him.

"Look, about this immunity deal...?"

"Dawn, the chances are that if you've got nothing on him now then nothing's going to come up in the future. And you can swing it, can't you, if he leads us to the Watchman?"

"It's a hell of a big "if"."

The drinks arrived. Alex drank down his beer in three long swallows, thought it probable for several minutes that he was going to vomit, then suddenly felt better.

Dressed, they strolled through the port, where Dawn bought herself a scoopneck top and a pair of skin-tight white jeans, and high-heeled mules. To look the part, she explained. Basic tradecraft.